The following description of background art may include insights, discoveries, understandings or disclosures, or associations together with disclosures not known to the relevant art prior to the present invention but provided by the invention. Some such contributions of the invention may be specifically pointed out below, whereas other such contributions of the invention will be apparent from their context.
An important factor in designing a future communication system is the support of higher data rates cost-effectively. One communication system supporting high data rates is the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Long Term Evolution (LTE) Release 8 radio access technologies for providing higher data rates cost-effectively exist. An improved version of the Long Term Evolution radio access system is called LTE-Advanced (LTE-A). The LTE is designed to support high-speed data, multimedia unicast and multimedia broadcast services.
Typically, higher data rates also set increased requirements for control signalling. Uplink control signals, such as Acknowledgement (ACK), Negative Acknowledgement (NACK), Channel Quality Indicator (CQI), and uplink scheduling requests may be transmitted on a Physical Uplink Control Channel (PUCCH) in the absence of uplink data.
One solution for providing higher data rates is a single user multiple input multiple output (SU-MIMO) method. In SU-MIMO, user equipment utilizes more than one antenna in communicating with base stations. Typically, the number of antennas may be two to four. However, the number of antennas is not limited to any specific number.